Suck It Up and Die (41 page)

In a flash, he realized what had happened. DeThanatos, CDing into a form known as a Hider, had transformed into the Matriarch to fool him. But transforming into a tree wasn’t as shocking as his next CD, a power Morning had never witnessed: the ability to transform into a spider
and
its web. His eyes darted around, looking for the creature that came with the ensnaring web.

A large Darwin’s bark spider legged toward him. In its jaws, it carried a sharp wedge of bristlecone pine.

The more Morning struggled against the web, the tighter it bound him. Knowing his next CD would probably fail from the neck up, he CDed into the only animal he could think of that might give him a chance. The secretary bird imploded to a blue crab. Its head was a miniature version of Morning’s, but it wasn’t the only thing that had miniaturized and failed to CD. The crab had one claw and one tiny human arm. Using its claw, the crab began slashing its way out of the web.

The spider spit out its bristlecone stake. It wasn’t clear if DeThanatos was put out by Morning’s escape or simply revolted by the sight of a crab with a human head and arm. The spider skittered in the opposite direction.

Morning CDed back into human form. Every muscle and joint ached. He had never felt so bone-weary and wasted after coming out of a CD. The heat of the pressing fire didn’t help. It reminded him that the only fight left was over who took him first: the red dragon or DeThanatos.

Not far away, DeThanatos’s body popped up from the ground. As the firelight danced on his muscles, it looked like he hadn’t broken a sweat. He gave Morning a haughty sneer. “Didn’t think I could spin a web, did you?”

“No,” Morning admitted. “What other tricks do Millennials have up their sleeves?”

DeThanatos raised his right arm; his forearm and hand snapped into the head of an anteater. “Keep your eyes on the anteater …,” he said, raising his left arm.

Knowing this was a trick, Morning locked his eyes on the raising arm, bracing for what was next. But the flash of something red coming from the anteater head grabbed his eyes long enough for him to see that it was only the ant-eater’s bizarrely long tongue.

In the microsecond of distraction, DeThanatos’s left arm lashed into a fifteen-foot anaconda. “…  and something else will getcha!” The huge snake sprang at Morning’s neck.

He barely jumped back in time.

DeThanatos had a good laugh as his arms sucked back to human form. Whatever fun he was having disappeared as fast as the anaconda. “Enough show-and-tell,” he growled. “Time for the wolf to lie down with the lamb.”

Before DeThanatos CDed, a groan coming from the fire pulled their eyes toward a tree consumed in flames. Its fiery crown wavered and fell toward them. They both jumped out of the way as the tree crashed to the ground in an eruption of fire, embers, and shrapnel.

Morning howled in pain. His eyes snapped to a long dagger of wood impaling his shoulder. The pain radiating through his body was overridden by another howl so soul-rending and terrifying it might have come from hell.

He stared up at the yowling face of light above the fallen tree. The visage twisted in pain, shot upward, and vaporized in the vault of stars.

From outside the ring of fire came the keening cry of thousands of birds.

DeThanatos lowered his gaze with a malicious chuckle. “So, when a bristlecone pine falls in the forest, it makes a noise … a lot of noise.” His eyes turned cold as steel. “Now, my boy, it’s time to meet your maker.”

Morning raised his hands and offered his last defense. “But if you destroy me, you’ll destroy yourself.”

DeThanatos shook his head. “Not if you’re no longer my blood child.”

“What makes you so sure I’m human again?”

“Tell you what. I’ll shape-shift into my favorite predator. If you don’t have an answer, we’ll know what you’ve become. And I won’t even have to use a stake.”

DeThanatos’s body disappeared, replaced by a ferocious dire wolf. On all fours, the wolf was as tall as Morning. Its slathering jaws were massive enough to decapitate a buffalo, which it used to do ten thousand years ago.

Morning clamped his eyes shut and tried to envision the merest creature, even a moth, to prove he was still a vampire. But all he could sense was the throbbing pain from the dagger in his shoulder. He opened his eyes.

The dire wolf threw back its huge head and howled. His blazing eyes returned to Morning. A strand of saliva
rappelled off his bared teeth. Not only was he going to relish the kill, Morning would now supply the blood meal DeThanatos would need to escape the fire. But this time, there would be no backwash, no mistakes.

Leaping out of its tracks, the wolf butted Morning in the chest. He sprawled to the ground, the wind knocked out of him. Morning’s lungs heaved for the breath that would be his last.

The wolf landed over him, raising its head to plunge its fangs in Morning’s throat. But the beast’s ears quirked to a sound. It ducked as a black shape darkened the fiery sky. Something sharp shredded the wolf’s ear. The wolf’s furious eyes snapped up as the black shape, a condor, wheeled a moment before flying into the fire.

The wolf returned to its kill; its eyes flashed with the sense of something different, something changed.
Where was the wooden dagger that had been impaled in the boy’s shoulder?

The answer came as Morning buried the dagger in the wolf’s heart.

The beast’s jaws snapped open; its body froze as a tremor of shock passed through it. It began to smolder.

Morning tucked and rolled away as the wolf burst into flames. Within seconds, it was a frame of burning bones; then the skeleton collapsed in a heap of ash.

Morning watched in exhausted wonder as a swirl of wind scattered the ashes until there was nothing left but a bristlecone seedpod. He had seen this before, a year earlier when Portia had used her powers as “a virgin who’s lost her heart to love” to slay DeThanatos and bury him in the Mother Forest. This time, Morning was going to ensure that DeThanatos never rose again.

He lifted a heavy rock and dropped it on the seedpod,
then offered the slain vampire a few last words. “I bet you thought I wasn’t a virgin who’d lost his heart to love. Still am.” His eyes lifted to the roaring fire, adding with a tight smile, “And will die one, too.”

He walked to the Matriarch and pressed his back into the seven-stemmed trunk. The fire would soon leap to the great mother tree and consume them both.

The condor sailed to the ground and shape-shifted into the broad and hairy Bosky.

“Who are you?” Morning asked.

“A Loner” was all he answered. “I’ve been trailing DeThanatos for some time.”

“Why did you help me?”

“Because”—Bosky turned to the burning trees—“you helped save the Mother Forest.”

Morning chuffed with bitterness. “It doesn’t look saved to me.”

“It will be soon.”

Before Morning could ask what he meant, a sound penetrated the roar of the fire. It sounded like the drone of aircraft. Then he heard the wail of sirens.

Bosky spread a hand on the great trunk and closed his eyes. “I ask you, Mother of the Forest, what will the boy’s reward be?” After a moment, he lifted his hand and looked at Morning. “You and your kind, re-mortals, will be spared the wrath of Millennials for one hundred years.”

Morning blinked in disbelief. “A hundred years? Really?”

Bosky nodded. “Really.”

He didn’t have to do the math. “That works for me.”

Bosky looked skyward at the birds beginning to rise into the smoky dawn. “It works for Loners, too. It’ll
clean the gene pool of vampires who, how shall I say, can’t handle the long haul of immortality.” The vampire’s mouth cornered into a smile. “After that, the Matriarch says the world is big enough for Loners
and
Leaguers.” He shape-shifted back into his condor and flew up to the treetop.

Through the veil of dancing spirits, Morning and the condor watched flying tankers take their turns as each veered toward the fire, banked, and discharged ribbons of orange fire retardant. Joining the fight from the ground, geysers of water arced through the air, hitting the fire and the great columns of steam now rising from it.

The steam didn’t rise high enough to obscure the fluttering shrouds of light above the fire. The luminescent spirit-plumes of the Old Ones began to shrink and retract into the charred yet still-standing trees of their graves. There was nothing joyous about their return to their roots of eternal rest. After all, one of the grave-trees had been destroyed, and the spirit dwelling within it had been cast into the sky of eternal wandering.

With the fire now only steam and billowing smoke, Morning stepped out from under the Matriarch and looked up. The condor soared high and away, racing from the impending sunrise.

When Morning looked down, a different group of apparitions began to emerge from the smoke and blizzarding ash. He grinned as the ghostly shapes transformed into human figures: Portia, Prowler, and his crew of fellow probies. But his joy was cut short as a bolt of fear shot through him. “What happened at Leaguer Mountain?” he shouted.

Portia continued toward him. “Zoë came to, had
her first blood product, and got to the president before Becky-Dell was able to torch the mountain.”

Morning started to ask if any Leaguers had been lost, but Portia, closing the gap between them, threw up a finger. “Shhh.” She stared at the bloody wound in his shoulder. Then she threw her arms around him and squeezed.

“Owwww!” he yelped.

She pulled back. “Sorry. I had to make sure. You’re still my eternal beloved”—she grinned from ear to ear—“but you’re not so eternal anymore.”

Hearing her utter the words
eternal beloved
for the first time might have drowned him in joy if it weren’t for his confusion. “Yeah”—he answered her grin with his own—“but I don’t get the no-longer-eternal part. What kick-started my mortality again?”

Prowler answered the mystery with a proud smile. “You don’t have to graduate from the academy to become a firefighter. You became one, right here.”

The probies seconded him with a huge cheer.

Portia put her hands on Morning’s shoulders, being careful not to hit his wound. “I’d give you a big congratulations kiss, but”—she turned to Prowler and the two dozen probies—“you’d never hear the end of it.”

The probies shouted in unison, “Kiss him!”

And she did.

In the next week a smorgasbord of events came to pass.

The president praised the military for its swift reaction to Becky-Dell’s deep-cover and illegal “mission leap” from Leaguer deportation to destruction. The attack had been thwarted moments before the Chinooks tossed their buckets of incineration into the mountain. The Leaguers who were shot with warfarin and staked received proper medical attention, and were recovering in the field hospital set up in the old Leaguer Academy.

Portia used the media to give Morning his day in court. She made her case that the “Morning” who turned Zoë was not the Morning the world had grown to know and love. With the help of testimony from witnesses, including herself, she established that the real Morning had a gnarly chin pimple that fateful night. Testimony from video experts confirmed that the vampire on the Washington Mews security video was pimple-free. To prove Morning innocent
beyond a shadow of a doubt, she also located footage from another street security camera showing the real Morning walking home with his flat-tire bike at the exact minute DeThanatos was robbing Zoë of her mortality.

Once Morning was exonerated and his heroics out west came to light, he was offered, along with Portia, Zoë, Cody, Rachel, Penny, Dolly, Prowler, the probies, and the Leaguers who flew with Morning, a ticker tape parade down Broadway. At first, Morning politely declined. Now that he was re-mortalizing, he longed to turn off the spotlight of fame for good and bask in the sunshine of normal life. But Penny persuaded him that the parade was the best PR in the world if he wanted back into the fire academy. So it came to pass that Zoë led the parade riding her Fanpire Tours pedicab with Morning and Portia as her passengers.